The green bins of Gaia

Gaia's convenient clothing collection business flourishes in Chicago, but its promises to promote the environment are questionable. Meanwhile, the international organization's leaders are under criminal indictment in Europe.

February 12, 2004|By David Jackson and Monica Eng, Tribune staff reporters. Tribune staff writer Courtney Flynn contributed to this report. and Monica Eng was a student in Tvind's Institutes for International Cooperation and Development from 1991 to 1992 in Massachusetts and Nicaragua. She has worked as a reporter and editor at the Chicago Tribune since 1996.

On a rainy June morning in 2000, a bright green bin landed on a Wrigleyville street corner.

Looking like an oversize chartreuse mailbox, it bore a strange poster that made a big promise: You feed in your old clothes, and our charity will sell them to finance environmental projects around the globe.

"We hire rangers," the box said, for "the protection of the living earth."

The projects ranged from the logical, like saving barrier reefs, to the puzzling -- "acting as partners in the solidary humanism." And although there was something peculiar about the language and the charity's uber-greenie name -- Gaia-Movement Living Earth Green World Action Inc. -- the box worked.

Within a week, Gaia's first container was brimming with old clothes.

By November 2003, the success of that single box at Clark Street and Newport Avenue had spawned more than 550 clones, an army of green clothing collection bins that seemed to rise overnight in parking lots and strip malls from Hazel Crest to Highland Park.

Gaia, the registered charity that places the bins, said in tax reports that from 1999 to the end of 2002, it reaped more than $2 million selling the donated clothes.

But despite what the boxes say, the group spent little if any of those earnings on environmental projects, records and interviews show.

Instead, the ubiquitous green bins finance a shadowy international organization known as "Tvind," sometimes called "the Teachers Group."

Started in 1970 by a collective of teachers who ran a countercultural high school in Denmark, Tvind slowly morphed into a $100 million labyrinth of commercial ventures and charities spread across some 35 countries, U.S. and Danish government records show.

Authorities in Belgium have indicted Pedersen and six Tvind leaders for money laundering.

Former Tvind members and European authorities have called the group a secular cult. Pedersen was a fugitive when FBI agents arrested him between international flights at Los Angeles International Airport in February 2002. A federal judge extradited the lanky, silver-haired guru to Denmark on an arrest warrant issued by the international police agency Interpol.

Pleading innocence, Pedersen said in Los Angeles federal court papers that Tvind is not a cult, but a group of dedicated humanists who live collectively and work to benefit the planet and the poor. Pedersen said he was being persecuted for political reasons.

But though Tvind leaders face criminal trial and front-page headlines in Europe, the group flourishes in the U.S.

In addition to several multimillion-dollar clothes collection businesses, Tvind has established three U.S. "institutes" in Michigan, Massachusetts and California that recruit volunteers to labor in Tvind-run development projects overseas.

Tvind's Chicago-area operations demonstrate how the international collective sustains itself by generous clothing donations, idealistic volunteers and the determination of middle managers who live in Spartan conditions for the sake of a revolutionary creed.

At the center are Gaia's green bins. They stand 6 1/2 feet tall and weigh 500 pounds when empty. In an America where the average person recycles or donates to charity less than a quarter of the 68 pounds of textiles he or she tosses out every year, the Gaia bins offer what people seem to want: painless altruism, cleaner closets and utter convenience.

"People want to feel good that they're donating clothes to a worthwhile place, but the first priority is to get it out of the closet," said Bernard Brill of the Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles Association. "Convenience is the No. 1 item with disposal."

Starting at first in affluent neighborhoods such as Wrigleyville, Gaia's 57-year-old director Eva Nielsen began scouting Chicago box locations by bicycle in 1999. She placed the first box outside Einstein Bros. Bagels at 3455 N. Clark St. It filled up quickly. "I had the feeling that they had been waiting for us to come," Nielsen said in an interview.

To place the bins in the parking lots of gas stations and grocery stores, Nielsen said, Gaia needs only the permission of the business owners. Nielsen used to keep a binder full of signed consent forms, but as the number of boxes in the Chicago area grew, she says she began relying on verbal permission. To encourage business owners from Chicago to Wisconsin to host Gaia boxes, Nielsen gathers and hands out letters of endorsement from local government officials. In some cities such as Madison, Wis., authorities were skeptical and declined to write the letters. Madison recycling coordinator George Dreckmann said he examined Gaia's program and turned her down for a letter of support in the spring of 2002.